1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for performing processing order determination control when a job ticket is converted among a plurality of printing systems, a control method, and a computer-readable storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the commercial printing industry, a commercial printing company receives an order for a request to produce printed products (magazine, newspaper, catalogue, advertisement, gravure, etc.) from a third party (customer, client), produces the printed product desired by the client, delivers the produced printed product to the client, and receives a fee from the client.
The use of a large-scale printing apparatus such as an offset type printing machine has dominated and still dominates this type of commercial printing industry. Work has been performed via various types of processes, described below. The processes include job entry, design, layout, comprehensive layout (presentation by printer output), proof reading (layout correction and color correction), proof print, block copy preparation, printing, post-processing, and shipping.
On the other hand, a market called print on demand (POD) has recently appeared against the above-mentioned commercial printing industry as electrophotographic printing apparatuses and ink-jet printing apparatuses have increased in speed and image quality. The POD aims at handling jobs in relatively small lots in a short delivery time without using a large-scale apparatus or a system. The POD has made the most of a digital image forming apparatus such as a digital copying machine or a digital multifunction peripheral (MFP) in place of the above-mentioned large-scale printing machine or printing method, to realize digital printing using electronic data.
In the POD market, digitization has been mixed better than in the conventional printing industry, so that management and control using a computer have infiltrated. In the POD market, a workflow including a plurality of processing processes (e.g., pre-print processing process, print processing process, and post-print processing process) is generated to obtain an output result. The printing system obtains an output result desired by a client efficiently by performing processing according to the processing processes in the workflow. There are few cases where one printing system includes all the processing processes in the workflow. A plurality of printing systems having different functions executes the processing processes in the workflow by performing communication on a network.
When the printing system receives a job ticket from a different printing system, as described above, the job ticket includes specific processing for only information required in another system area in many cases. The job ticket describes only abstract information based on a user's instruction for the processes executed in the printing system in many cases. In such cases, the printing system requires processing for converting the job ticket into a job ticket including specific information to be controlled within the system area. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-156671 discusses a technique relating to print job conversion control in an information processing apparatus for converting a print job among a plurality of printing systems having different functions.
In the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-156671, functional information of a printing apparatus in the printing system is acquired, and the print job is converted based on work instruction data and content data. However, the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-156671 does not consider a processing order to be executed in the printing apparatus because the functional information is acquired for each processing performed in the printing apparatus to convert the print job. Therefore, the print job may be executed in an erroneous order.
When a plurality of options having the same function exists in one printing apparatus, for example, it may not be found which of the options may be used to execute the print job. The print job is executed in a processing order different from a processing order desired by a client so that the obtained output product may differ from that desired by the client. Alternatively, the job ticket may be converted in a processing order that is nonexecutable by the printing apparatus, so that the print job may be canceled.